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It’s just past the stroke of midnight when the familiar overwhelm takes hold. It shouldn’t be a surprise. You knew, in the back of your mind, that it would happen eventually - your senses have never been kind to you, not even in the subdued darkness of the Ninth. In this glittering headache of a ballroom, it would only be a matter of time.
You still aren’t ready for it when it finally happens. It hits you with all the sudden sharpness of a slap to the face. All at once, your composure begins to dissolve. All at once, it’s too much. Your defenses - so carefully shored up - crumble apart like so much ancient bone. You can feel the crawling tension settle tight against your skin, the scratching bite of ragged black lace at your wrists, at your collar, the leaden heaviness of your gown where it tangles around your stumbling legs, coltish and clumsy in your haste to get out, just get out, get away before you break down completely -
You push through the crowd with your eyes trained steadily on the floor, flinching at the tidal waves of noise that crash over you in a senseless roar of music-voices-laughter-clinking-glass, clicking-heels-and-screeching-strings-and -
“Whoa. You alright?”
The voice is low. Soft. Unfamiliar. You force your eyes upward and marshal your last bit of Ninth dignity to stare the stranger down, push past them without a word - but something about them pulls you up short. They swim before your eyes in disjointed mosaic. Bright red and honey gold, the pressed line of a suit jacket and the crooked knot of a tie, a hand, crisply gloved, reaching out -
You flinch back, the words held captive in your throat wrenching free in an awful, strangled hum. The hand drops.
“Sorry, sorry. Bad idea. Do you need help? Because I might be able to help.”
You shake your head - a sharp jerk that makes your earrings rattle.
“No? Okay, that’s fine. Not a problem.” A pause. The roar of the crowd rushes into the empty space their - her? - voice leaves behind. “Can I show you to the exit at least? So you can get some air?”
Some feeble, cowering part of you thinks that reasonable, and even as the rest of your brain screams itself hoarse at the indignity you find yourself nodding.
“Okay. Cool. Right this way.”
The stranger’s strides are long and powerful, cutting through the throng with loose-limbed ease as you trail like a wretched shadow in her wake. The room seems to hush around her, curtains of blessed quiet falling with her every confident step. This strikes you, distantly, as odd, but you can’t spare even a scrap of presence of mind to wonder why.
Time slips by in vague, syrupy droplets - an instant or a myriad could pass and your churning mind wouldn’t know the difference. Faces blur past you through the threads of your veil and the overwrought haze. You can hear whispers, half-realized murmurs that ebb and swirl around you like so much dark water and then - fade. Drift away into nothingness as though they were never there. Your mind’s favorite cruel trick.
Longing for the grounding texture of your rosary, you worry the cool, smooth bone of a bracelet between your fingers and force your breathing to slow. In and out, metronomic, just like you were taught. In and out until the world rights itself. Until you hear nothing more than the lurching thrum of your heartbeat and the creak of ancient wood as the stranger beckons you through one last door.
It’s dark, wherever she’s escorted you. Dark and blissfully cool. A light breeze tugs playfully at your hair as your eyes adjust.
Paving-stones gleam in the pinprick starlight. A fountain burbles softly. The wind, as it whistles past you once more, carries the scent of rich soil and roses, saltwater on stone. A garden.
You make your unsteady way toward a smooth marble bench beside the murmuring fountain and perch lightly on the edge. Your feet swing a scant inch above the ground. The stranger's - in her worn, clunky black boots - do not. You feel faintly chagrined by this, then find yourself wondering why, exactly, you're surprised. She's always been taller than you.
Always.
She's always been taller than you. This girl you've known for an hour - an evening - a lifetime - seventeen God-forsaken years, you knew her, knew her like the flowers of the drillshaft know the sun, knew her and wasted it, you miserable fucking wretch -
The girl smiles ruefully. The chill night air around her boils like a storm in a bottle. Her mosaic image shatters further, shards of red and gold slipping through your fingers, powdered to dust as you scrabble and claw for purchase, for anything, anything to hold on to -
All you come up with is a whisper, soft and bitter and sad. I kind of wish this was how it happened. But we both know it's not.